Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Superfood Supper

I don't know that I really buy into the superfood hype, but I do know that some foods are pretty darn healthy. To balance out my junk food/ramen noodle/beer habit, I try to squeeze in as many of these so-called "superfoods" whenever I can. You know, stuff like quinoa, sprouts, miso paste, and cacao.

Julie Morris' Superfood Kitchen is making sneaking in my superfoods a little bit easier. This new all-vegan, hardback, full-color tome is filled with nutritious recipes that don't seem too hippie-fied or too bland. If Asian Tempeh Lettuce Cups and BBQ Sweet Potato Fries are superfoods, count me in. Each recipe is made with uber-healthy ingredients, and at least one ingredient is from the superfood club. For example, the sweet potato fries contain maca powder, from a radish-like root that contains around 60 phytonutrients.

Everything sounds so amazing that I had a really hard time narrowing down a couple recipes to try for this review. But I finally settled on this Tofu-Broccoli Quiche with Quinoa Crust:

Wow! I've had vegan quiche a few times, but this one really takes the cake, er, quiche. The tofu is seasoned with sauteed onion and broccoli, nooch, tahini, and ume plum vinegar (another superfood). It's super firm and almost egg-like after its baked. And the crust! Oh the crust! It's made from cooked quinoa held together with flax eggs (that's two superfoods!). I thought the crust might fall apart, but no way. It was as firm or firmer than any pastry crust I've ever made. Check it out:

For my side, I made the Goddess Kale Salad:

This creamy, tangy salad is made from raw kale massaged with a mixture of tahini, olive oil, hemp seeds, spices, vinegars, and spirulina. It also calls for optional kelp powder, but I left that out because I think kelp powder is nasty.

Now that I've made two amazing recipes from Superfood Kitchen, I'm making my list of what to try next. The Tater(-Like) Tots sounds really different and delicious. Instead of using potatoes, you use Great Northern beans, flaxseed, quinoa, miso, and brown rice flour to create something resembling a tot.

6 comments:

I like the quinoa crust idea too! Having recently made the tofu-spinach frittata in Everyday Happy Herbivore, it sounds like the quinoa would soak up some of the liquid from the tofu and turn out really nice.